


Were the World Ours

by trascendenza



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Female Protagonist, Multi, POV Female Character, Women Being Awesome, layers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-15
Updated: 2010-08-15
Packaged: 2017-10-11 02:53:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/107562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trascendenza/pseuds/trascendenza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Circles within circles, that was her preference; the mind always gravitated back towards the organic, towards permeable barriers and malleable shapes.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Were the World Ours

**Author's Note:**

> For my lovely tinheart. &lt;3

He didn't _understand._ That way out, it wouldn't work at this depth; it was inviting complete dissolution, soft destruction. She'd planned more carefully than that, long ago mapped out the possibilities and contingencies and the ten thousand ways this could all go to hell -- she knew how to get home.

And wasn't it just like him, to hide what was most important in plain sight. He wouldn't be so obvious as to create a safe or a buried vault; Dominic was diseased with too much knowledge, too keen an awareness of how the mind built transparencies into its environment.

An antique newspaper, finely yellowed and innocuous enough on the front. Advertisements for ten cent laundering, a film without sound, an article about a war that was only so many shell casings in the soil. It was five pages in that she found what she needed, a neatly handwritten list of reminders, of structure, of the foundations upon which all else rested.

An eraser and an _isn't_ became _is_, and she exhaled slowly, sure that this was a terrible power to hold, but the more necessary for it. All they needed was time to be free again.

**i.**

There is a certain disappointment in the mundanity of it all. Somehow she'd thought that cut loose the inherent generative powers would surge, would drench everything in the beautiful surrealism that compelled them down here in the first place, but instead it was in exact opposition to the intuitive inclination: ordered, dissected, categorized, partitioned off.

Hours roll into days roll into months and she tries to look away, but she can't, a morbid compulsion holding her in place as if she's truly trapped and not just slowly suffocating with what passes for reality here.

*

The creator of your own destiny, that was what they joked the slogan would be once they marketed it to the masses. Though they both knew, they had that feeling in the back of their minds, that crawling sensation that tells you what you're doing is far too dangerous to ever leave dark alleyways or backroom deals. That tells you what you're doing would never be allowed to grow beyond its potential as a weapon or as a trap or as a functional machine, because it'll unravel things to the point where they'll be unrecognizable. That much power in the hands of the many could lead to unpredictable and undesirable results for those holding onto the structures that existed in self-perpetuating maintenance.

Mallorie knew, at least. She knew and she planned with every crevice and niche she carved into that piece, that anchor, that reminder that no one else would ever know this one thing the way she did, that no other would _experience_ what she experienced when she held it in her hand and reassured herself she hadn't fallen into someone else's idea of a world.

There were things she feared, and there were things that made her sick in her bones at the mere thought, that made her long for the horrifying safety of a cold, dark dungeon. It was the latter that drove her work, that directed the source of her research and trial runs; the constant awareness of the possibility of tipping over the brink into someone else's mental abyss kept her sharp, it kept her hard, and it influenced everything, down to her selection of lab rats and the human equivalent thereof.

"You'll do nicely," she told an especially plump one, sliding the needle behind his translucent ear. It twitched, a pink glowing concave turning around to face her as if in greeting.

"If I didn't know better, I'd think you were going to eat him," Arthur commented, thumbs at clean angles out of the top of his pockets, notched right along those narrow hips. She noted the cant sidelong, appreciating the lines. The boy had an innate sense of his own proportions.

"Hardly a morsel," she said, stepping back from the cage as the rat swayed on its feet and dropped onto its side with a gentle, plush sound that brought a smile to her face. They were always so peaceful with their underbellies exposed. She twisted her neck to look at Arthur, chin lining up with her shoulder, and gave the lean silhouette of his body a frank evaluation. "Hmmm," she concluded.

"Tell me I'm better than the rat," he said, mock-pleading, wry, a thin veneer covering up his minute tells: the flush just beginning to rise underneath his skin; the tip of his shoe sweeping over the floor rhythmically, a soft swishing sound; the slight tightening in his abdomen when she looked at him, elevated to an audible intake of air when she held the eye contact longer than appropriate.

"You'll do," she said, taking pity, because anything more and he'd have to turn away, and it would ruin all those beautifully constructed lines.

*

She created with the intricacy of an experienced shuttle flying over a loom, layer upon tightly woven layer that built in redundancies of redundancies and backdoors that she could find no matter how deep the sleep, no matter how convincing the cloying visceral experience that lured and lulled with its sheer physicality.

"We have eradicated the concept of safety," she said, leading him around a blind corner that folded itself inside out and seamlessly brought them back to the beginning. Circles within circles, that was her preference; the mind always gravitated back towards the organic, towards permeable barriers and malleable shapes that didn't mark out space with hard-edged corners and unforgiving lines. Her buildings liked to breathe. "Never forget that."

"But we know," he said, hovering his habitual one pace behind her, ever the dutiful student. "We know how to tell the difference."

They reached the water; approaching from afar, it had been a thin stream, curving auspiciously along the boundary of the park, the water murmuring nonsense invitingly. All movement and sound had ceased and the featureless, unnaturally still blue stretched as far as their eyes could imagine. Their feet looked naked in the oversaturated grass.

"If only we had eradicated the concept of arrogance," she said. She lightened the reproach by reaching out and looping her index finger under his wrist, resting her thumb just on the center on the other side. She wondered how intentional the beating of his pulse was; so many of the things that would reveal above could just as well be masks here.

"I won't forget," he said, and she could see that he didn't just say it because he thought that's what she wanted, she could see that he _believed_ it because that's what she wanted and that was the power he freely gave her. It was an effort not to change his skin to clay underneath her fingers.

"Let's go for a swim," she said, and pulled him towards the water, towards submersion. He didn't hold back.

**ii.**

What she finds the most fascinating is the subtle shifts, the little things one wouldn't notice if one weren't watching very, very closely. Singly, they're seemingly inconsequential, but it is the accumulation, the entirety of the mosaic that differentiates what's standing in front of her from what resounds still in her memories.

"Arthur," she murmurs, tracing two of her fingertips along the elegant arc of his eyebrow.

"Please," he says, the word hardly formed before his teeth are biting into his lower lip and he's sliding his gaze away from hers, as if he can't watch precisely because he wants to.

"Not quite like I remember," she whispers as she leans in and nips at his upper lip.

But then he sighs, and it's exactly like she remembers, and that's an entirely different kind of revealing.

*

Teachers weren't meant to have favorites, they knew that, but seven months into the program and here the three of them were long past midnight, eating cold latkes by candlelight and arguing the semantics of reality. She couldn't say that she had not seen this coming.

*

She understood, likely better than Arthur did; the infatuation was more directed at their combination than their individuality. She wondered if her sense of feminine prowess ought to feel diminished by this revelation, but she couldn't be bothered. There was a classical bent to the boy, an antiquated appreciation and idealization of love that had baffled her at first, all the nights that he put in extra time at the lab _so you can get home to Dom, I know you two hardly get any time together._ She saw now that it was part of his anachronistic, contradictory makeup: he forged ahead into modernity with the sensibilities of a man a hundred years his senior. _Twenty going on ancient,_ Eames liked to say. She couldn't disagree.

"Transference of passion onto the nearest available surface," Dominic dismissed, waving a hand as if the topic were an airborne irritant he could disperse. "Painfully common. He'll get over it." He had the stub of a pencil behind his ear; the thick, yellow lamplight shone off the immaculate surface of his hair. Coral formations of papers covered the work surface.

"He twitches every time we kiss." Mallorie slid her thumb into her waistband, cool satin on one side and heated skin on the other, running her nail just above the hairline with a satisfied hum. She leaned her head back, taking an extended drag from her cigarette that she felt all down the back of her throat. She closed her eyes, smiling. "I do not think it is because he wants us to stop."

"Don't be absurd." She heard papers rustle. They soon pointedly stopped rustling and she heard Dominic move closer.

She slid her thumb deeper, curling the four fingers on the other side of the fabric down to cup herself, to anchor, to evoke the naked longing she saw in their young protegé's eyes every time she so much as brushed her husband's skin. "Even as we play this game," she said, setting down the cigarette and beginning to work the buttons of her shirt, "we imagine him here."

Dominic's hands slid up her sides; she arched up to him, thighs sliding apart to accommodate his hips, the backs of her fingers catching against the textured fabric of his pants.

"I don't see how that's of any consequence," he said, voice breathy against her throat, just the sort of hedging admission she'd expected. She laughed, moving her hands up along his back, digging her nails in along the tough lines of muscle.

**iii.**

What she finds most disappointing is watching herself (what could have been herself), how one-note and shrill she has become. Surely she couldn't have faded so much in such a short time; surely she had more dimensions, more nuanced facets that would have remained.

She watches herself murder her husband's latest plaything. Well, then, perhaps not.

*

"This is certainly unexpected," Ariadne said, a small smile playing on her lips as she examined Mallorie.

"What?" Mallorie said, pulling out a cigarette primarily for the effect; their were virtually flavorless -- a strange detail to overlook, but then again, he'd never been much of a smoker -- and seemed to exist solely for aesthetic function. "That I am here?"

"Neither." Ariadne stepped forward, plucking the cigarette with deft fingers and inhaling at a leisurely pace. Her profile was lovely in the yellow saturation of the warehouse. "That you're undeniably real."

"We all have our faults," Mallorie rejoined, brushing a strand back from the girl's face and thinking how odd it was that this was the most seen she'd felt since she got here, by some hardly-grown fragment of a dream.

*

Mallorie marveled at her, at the raw audacity with which she sunk her arms to the elbow and transformed the physics of her surroundings. There was an elemental nature to Ariadne's confidence, a synchronicity of like recognizing like; her composition responded to the environment and the environment reached out, drawn to her in an elegant dance of interaction. She and the world were of the same substance and yet distinct, a delicate interplay, an infinite loop of creation constantly renewed.

Watching her work was bearing witness to autogenesis, the clay forming itself into shape unbidden.

"Your existence amazes me," she said, tracing two fingers down Ariadne's spine, which rippled under her ministrations like the surface of a lake being skimmed by wind. She felt like water, too: cool, almost weightless, soothing.

She felt Ariadne's fingers curl around her ankle, and Ariadne leaned back against her, head coming to rest in the crook between Mallorie's shoulder and neck. "A completely natural feeling," Ariadne said, smiling a young smile upwards.

"I never would have thought he could have contained you." Mallorie watched the inverted mountain ahead of them spin on its apex, as if the earth were a record and it was the needle. The mountain shot roots up into the sky that surged towards the clouds, sinking into them.

"He didn't," Ariadne said, flicking a finger and changing the spin of the mountain. "Not completely. But when you go this deep, all things -- what underlies all things -- tends to..." she waved her hand, rivers reshaping with the motion, "blend together."

"So they do," Mallorie said, planting a kiss at the base of Ariadne's neck. The stars rotated around them and she relaxed into the spin, settling her hands on Ariadne's rushing skin and letting her breath leave her body in tendrils of fine, twining smoke.

**iv.**

She finds a certain comfort in the happiness he attains, in understanding Dominic well enough that she foresaw this. It is a cold comfort, a guilty comfort -- the source of her guilt is that she does not feel guiltier. She ought not be here, even with the backdoors and the redundancies of redundancies, and she knows this; she ought not _try_, and this she knows more than anything.

*

"Dominic," she said, "Dominic, you must listen."

"What's going--" he swung around wildly, looking at the two of her standing in front of him, and she would destroy the shade of herself if she weren't sure it would simply create more of them, an army of her shadows descending to devour her.

She reached for him, reached past the screeching, tearful illusion and for a brief second she felt him, felt the familiar texture of his calluses and the comfort of his fingers gripping hers in return.

"Dominic," she said, holding him with all the desperation of years running into the same wall over and over again, "Dominic, you must remember."

"Of course I remember," he said, smiling down at her like he pitied her, and she felt the twist in her stomach, the mind-rending sensation of falling while standing upright. "I remember you."

"No," she said, but already the shadows were gathering, "you must remember yourself."

Her own fingernails clawed at her, dozens of gnarled hands pulling her away, and she let go, she let go. Dominic did not even see her disappear.

*

It was once, only once:

"Mal," he said, his features lifted with elation, and it felt as if the entirety of her body were crumbling in relief at his recognition, at this validation. "Is it...is it really you?"

"It is, love, I came, I came back for you --"

"Oh, look," he said, gaze focusing over her shoulder. He dropped her hands, starting off towards the door. "It's the children."

"Dom --" Her hand curled into her chest; she felt as if she'd been shot.

"Aren't they beautiful?" he said, lovingly vacant, pressing his fingers to the glass door.

"Beautiful," she agreed. It was not the last time.

**v.**

She stands at the shore. Arthur is on one side, Ariadne on the other.

She watches the ocean churn, and mourns the leaving, mourns all that she has let go to come to this place. She holds their hands and feels the familiarity of their calluses and knows that they are thin veils for something that still recognizes her.

She looks at them, and is glad that they are here to take care of him even if they are inherently constricted in capacity by their creator.

She looks at them and thinks that maybe this was her gift to her husband, this place, this infinite capacity to create and re-create, to exist within exactingly delineated personal limitations. This is what she gave him, this is what she cannot take from him, this is what she will forever question as the right decision: _the world that you live in is real._

She lets go of their hands and walks forward. Cold water engulfs her and as it fills her lungs, she reaches into her vest and finds a small piece of metal curved like a river and holds and holds and holds it until it's all that she can feel.


End file.
